“After a short consultation the jury returned a verdict of guilty only, and the infamous Chief Justice—a second Jeffreys—with a countenance beaming with hellish smiles, bowed to the jury.”
Miller was in due course sentenced to be hanged, but this sentence was commuted to transportation. We find him and twelve others, all Canadians, chained and sent by steamer Cobourg to Kingston. From Kingston the party were sent by another steamer to Montreal. After being changed again they reached Quebec. Here the thirteen Canadian prisoners were put on board a timber ship and sent to England. From the fact that so very few Canadians know that Canadians were transported to the other side of the world, the author makes special mention of this matter. To-day we would not think of doing such things, and very many Canadians will be inclined to question the truthfulness of the statement. But, in all, ninety-one Canadian state prisoners were sent to that distant penal colony. A few lines of verse may be inserted as very apt and striking. They are by T. R. Harvey:
Morn on the waters! And purple and bright
Bursts on the billows the flashing of light;
O’er the glad waves like a child of the sun,
See, the tall vessel goes gallantly on.
Full to the breeze she unbosoms her sail,
And her pennon streams onward like hope in the gale;
The winds come around her in murmur and song,
And the surges rejoice as they bear her along.
See, she looks up to the golden-edged clouds,
And the sailor sings gaily aloft in her shrouds.
Onward she glides amid ripple and spray,
Over the waters, away and away!
Bright as the visions of youth ere they part,
Passing away like a dream of the heart.
Who, as the beautiful pageant sweeps by,
Music around her and sunshine on high,
Pauses to think amid glitter and show
Oh, there be hearts that are breaking below!
Night on the waves! And the moon is on high,
Hung like a gem on the brow of the sky,
Treading its depths in the power of its might,
And turning the clouds, as they pass her, to light.
Look to the waters! Asleep on their breast
Seems not the ship like an island of rest?
Bright and alone on the shadowy main,
Like a heart-cherished home on some desolate plain.
Who, as he watches her silently gliding,
Remembers that wave after wave is dividing
Bosoms that sorrow and guilt could not sever,
Hearts that are parted and broken forever?
Or dreams that he watches afloat on the wave,
The death-bed of hope, or the young spirit’s grave.
So far as can be known only thirteen of the ninety-six ever got back home to Canada, after years of waiting, hoping and praying. All the others found untimely graves in that far-off land, where they died broken-hearted and alone.
Linus Wilson Miller did not get home until August, 1846, he being one of the very first to reach America. A sailing ship brought him to Pernambuco. At that port the captain of the American barque Globe accepted a bill drawn by him on his father for his passage, he being totally without money. Englishmen and Americans resident at Pernambuco however, on learning the facts, and being acquainted with the desperate treatment of Miller, raised the funds to take up the bill and send him on home. To-day we consider the execution of Lount and Matthews simply judicial murder, and Sir George Arthur went to his reward in after years with a heavy load on his conscience. It is hardly in the bounds of possibility for him ever to forget the time when Mrs. Lount knelt before him and prayed for the life of her husband, and he refused to as much as listen to her.
Van Schultz too, poor fellow, a Pole, who escaped oppression in his own country, came to the United States; then, fancying us oppressed, he voluntarily tried to help us, and, as we all know, was captured at the disturbance at Windmill Point, Prescott. Generous and impulsive, but misguided, his execution was another judicial murder exulted in by the Family Compact. Linus Wilson Miller’s crimes to-day would perhaps be met by a half year’s sentence of incarceration. But he was broken down in health by the hard usage and hard work he had to endure in Tasmania, as well as were all the other state prisoners. Being a state prisoner he would not now be compelled to labor, if treated as political prisoners are treated the world over. He and all the others were worked to the bone, flogged, and most of them sent to early graves in that far-off land.
Thank God, we have changed all that.
Lord Durham came out as Governor-General right after the trouble. Responsible constitutional government was granted, and all the reforms the people asked for. Not in the most remote degree was the Home Government responsible for our misusage, nor for the uprising, for it knew nothing of it. In illustration of this, the following example is pertinent: When Sir Francis Bond Head, who was the supreme Governor General during the uprising, was on his way home he stopped at New York. There he met Marshal S. Bidwell, then an exile, and a man universally acknowledged as at the head of the bar in Canada. Sir Francis deliberately told Bidwell he had received instructions from the Home Government to appoint him judge. Bidwell turned and fled, and never bade adieu to him. On gaining the street he first thought of returning and apologizing for his rudeness, but the injury was too great, and he never saw Head again? Can we wonder at the Canadian uprising when such things could be?
At the top of a parchment Crown deed to one of the Conants the name of Sir Francis Bond Head appears, and never can the author look upon that parchment without unpleasant thoughts of the man’s poltroonery and narrowness.